Between literature and science: Freud and the demon of interpretation

Abstract

Summary This essay examines a number of diverse responses, in recent exchanges between psychoanalytic theory, literary theory and the practices of textual analysis, to the ambiguous textual status of Freud's writing ‐ its uneasy position on the borders between literature and science. In Section I a distinction is drawn between Patrick Mahony's reading of Freud in Freud as a writer, and those readings of Freud's texts associated with what has popularly come to be known as “French Freud”, in particular Derrida's reading of the second chapter of Beyond the pleasure principle. While the underlying objective of both these readings might be said to be the constitution of Freud's scientific project as itself an example of figurative writing, the outcome of each is crucially different. Section II is directed at the critical tradition for whom Freud's genius was “poetic” rather than scientific; his ideas more valuable as “metaphors” than as literal truths. In Section III an alternative approach is put forward, exemplified in Arnold Davidson's reading of Freud's Three essays on sexuality, which presents a version of Freud's “genius” as neither an imaginative nor a rhetorical one so much as a conceptual one. In Section IV it is suggested that Freud's transcendence of the usual boundaries of science was the enabling dynamic of his thought.